Follow that guy last month. The death of ephemeral conversation. Systems that never forget (9:40) …a public-private-surveillance partnership (9:58) … We have built systems that spy on people in exchange for services. Surveillance is the business model of the internet (10:13)

This is truely the golden age of surveillance. Because everything we do is surveillable (11:37)

Metadata equals surveillance (12:09). Okay, there’s sort of an easy thought experiment: imagine you’d hire a private detective to eavesdrop on somebody. That detective will put a bug in his car, his home, his office; and you’d get a report of the conversations he had. If you ask that same detective to put someone under surveillance you’d get a different report: where he went, who he spoke to, what he read, what he purchased, what he looked at – right, that’s all metadata. Fundamentally metadata equals surveillance data. (12:40)

We have built an insecure internet for everyone. We basically enabled the Panopticon, and all the losses of freedom and liberty and individuality that come with that. (16:47)

From Stellar Wind to PRISM, Boundless Informant to EvilOlive, the NSA spying programs are shrouded in secrecy and rubber-stamped by secret opinions from a court that meets in a faraday cage. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Kurt Opsahl explains the known facts about how the programs operate and the laws and regulations the U.S. government asserts allows the NSA to spy on you.

Where the debate over privacy rights is concerned, there exists a perpetual danger of being drawn into one of two extreme camps: One that would dismantle all security entirely, leaving us open to those very real threats that exist at home and abroad, and the other that would submerge our basic rights and freedoms beneath an Orwellian surveillance state, all in the name of our collective safety. Of course; freedom isn’t free, it just seems that way because we have been blessed to live in an oversaturated freedom market. On the other hand, although the price of freedom is still eternal vigilance, it seems there are those who would impose an artificial price hike; having us pay eternal vigilance, plus groping and manhandling fees, plus a whopping one hundred and fifty percent interest. These folks don’t necessarily hate freedom, they’d just prefer that you visit it in a museum under a glass cover.

If this sounds like a paranoid fantasy, let us reflect upon the following evidence for the recent and undue ascension of Big Brother in our Western Democracies.